Speed Mathematica up for doing analysis and plotting with large arrays

Questions
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1

I’m doing analysis and plotting with very large arrays. Mathematica is getting bogged down. Matlab doesn’t seem to have this problem or at least not to this degree. What can I do, if anything, go help speed Mathematica up?
Thanks.

2

For computation: Use packed arrays. Keep them packed.

For plotting: I’m not sure. ArrayPlot[] in the following runs in about in 0.7-0.8 sec; MatrixPlot[] in 5-6 sec.

ArrayPlot[RandomReal[1, {5000, 10000}]]
MatrixPlot[RandomReal[1, {5000, 10000}]]

It’s possible that your actual code is not as efficient as it could be. But how could anyone tell that without knowing what the code is?

3

I would first try to figure out what part of Mathematica is becoming too slow: The kernel, the front-end or a combination?

The kernel may be slow down when using too much RAM, or you code may be in need of optimization.

The front-end may become slow due having some cells that are just too large. Rasterizing plots could help. There are tools to help you identify huge cells in you notebook. Too many open notebooks also slow it down.

The combination of kernel / front-end will become slow when you have dynamic content that is being updated too frequently.

4

Thanks. I’ll check this out. For now I ended up plotting just a piece of the data. That helped a lot.